First, Do No Harm

First, Do No Harm.  First, Do No Harm.  First, Do No Harm.  

This is what emergency response personnel have drilled into their heads, at least in the place where I learned to be a “first, first responder” aka a 9-1-1 emergency dispatcher.  

I hung up my invisible super hero cape years ago, but “first, do no harm” is still a guiding principle in my day to day life.  

Like so many of my friends and family and so many people Adam & I have met in our travels, knowing that it is impossible to have zero impact, we try to find ways to live our lives that have as much positive and as little negative impact on our fellow sentient beings and the ecosystems that are our life support systems as possible.  

Reading news stories this morning which featured small, barefoot children being tear gassed by the U.S. Border Patrol and untold acres of rainforest habitat being wiped out by a desire for cheap palm oil to put in nutritionally questionable snack foods was devastating to me.  

It seems that the Border Patrol could, with a little bit of creativity and ingenuity, “protect” our borders without tear gassing small children.  There is no part of me that fears those children or their parents.  They only want what we all want - safe communities to live and work in.  Freedom to live.  Freedom to move.  

And it seems to me that every corporation, as part of it’s charter agreement, should have to agree to first, do no harm.  The race to the bottom for corporate profit and cheap goods is doing so much harm.  

So many of us live our personal lives trying to do no harm and to do as much good as we can, where we are, with what we have.  Our governments and the corporations that touch every aspect of human life today need to be doing the same.